Thursday, January 16, 2014

Here's a link to the archetypesI used for an upcoming Fate core game set in the classic Shadowrun time period of 2050. One of the important revelations: Adapting up from Fate Core is easier than adapting down from Shadowrun.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Part of knowing evil geniuses is being asked to participate in their experiments from time to time. When Fred Hicks sent me an email asking for some more pitches, I was just glad he wasn't asking me to watch cheesy movies in outer space. (I prefer the comfort of my couch) The company had a lot of success with Kickstarter last year, to which I was excited to contribute CAMELOT Trigger. If you're a fan of CAMELOT Trigger, and are already saying "Shut Up And Take My Money", bless your crooked little heart, and head on over to the Patreon page. Otherwise, let me bend your ear eyes for a moment and tell you about the project.

This year Evil Hat wanted to try out a new crowdfunding website called Patreon. Rather than release another big book of Fate Worlds, they want to try out a periodical model, for which Patreon is a better fit. You pledge a small amount and, when the producer is ready to put out the periodical, they send it out to you and you get charged. You only get charged when an issue is ready to go. So rather than get 6 awesome Fate settings at once, you get a regular deposit throughout the year. Brian Engard's superpunk Venture City Stories is the first out of the gate and the only one currently guaranteed to release right now. Fred's tapped some great folks in addition to myself should the project be successful, like Pete Woodworth, Shoshana Kessock and Quinn Murphy, all of whom have much prettier websites than mine.

Like Kickstarter, there are different levels of patronage, with early access and backer feedback accompanying a bigger buy in. Backer feedback was invaluable to the success of CAMELOT Trigger, and I'm looking forward to that feedback for Save Game.

For those of you who haven't looked at the page yet, here's the pitch for Save Game:

"A vicious computer virus threatens to corrupt the entire internet. The only thing standing in its way are the characters from your video games. 8-bit heroes battle monsters and corrupted files. It's Wreck-It Ralph meets Lord of the Rings. This will feature randomized character creation and other new-player-friendly features, as well as rules for playing in a digital world."

There's some ReBoot and Tron in there, too. Part of the fun will be rolling random powers and figuring out why your character jumps high, shoots fire and occasionally dresses up as a raccoon to fly. We've had some interesting discussions about characters having Lives instead of consequences and a couple of different ways to randomize power generation. Even if you don't like the idea of old-school video game heroes, you could use it to make a slightly meta game about your favorite MMO characters teaming up to beat back the forces of the Glitch.

An example of a character mutated by the Glitch?

"Corrupted pac-man sits, sarlacc/azathoth like, hungering for data in the center of a twisting turning maze, with his ghosts bringing him morefoodmorefoodmorefood"

Should the pitch get the green light, I will post development blogs again. One of the most common bits of feedback I got from CAMELOT Trigger were people who were lukewarm on the initial pitch but then came around after they read my development blogs or saw the backers draft. If that sounds like fun, and I hope it does, you can make it happen.

As long as we're talking about Fate-related Patreons, I'd like to mention Mark Diaz Truman's Fate Codex is doing well. We discussed some article ideas over the past few days, and the essay I'll be working on will be a great short project in between larger Fate gigs.

Girls' Heist Out Kickstarter

@robowieland on Twitter

An author, blogger, pop culture writer and game designer that writes about pirates, gangsters, Jedi, dragons, zombies and whatever else pays. Noted for his work on Shadowrun, Star Wars Saga Edition and Firefly RPG. Creator of CAMELOT Trigger, Mafia Century, Encore, Save Game and Girls' Heist Out. Other projects include work on Honor and Intrigue, Edge of Midnight, Hillfolk, Our Last Best Hope, 7th Sea/Swashbuckling Adventures, Night's Black Agents, 13th Age, CHILL 3rd Edition, and Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary. His online presence includes multiple game blogs, interviews and articles for Milwaukee Record, Geek & Sundry and Onion AV Club. He lives in scenic Milwaukee, Wisconsin with his wife, who has many skills more useful for the zombie apocalypse.